AAC Awareness Resources

PowerPoint: Talking Stories with Navigation Buttons: How to do it

There is a PowerPoints presentation called Talking Books

Start a new PowerPoint Presentation. Choose a design, background, and layout for your slides. You can change these at any time.

Add Action Buttons for your readers to navigate your story. Copy and paste the buttons to every slide in your story. We use buttons that go to First Slide, Previous Slide, Next Slide, and Last Slide.

Slide 1 will not need a First or Previous button, and the last Slide will not need a Next or Last button. Delete the unwanted Action Buttons from Slide 1 and the last slide.

Write your story and add any pictures.

You can record your story into PowerPoint from your communication aid using a microphone, or insert ready-made sound files from your computer. We make the sound files from text using text-to-speech programs that save text as WAV, AIFF or MP3 files.

You might like to add the sound for all the text on one slide at once, or you might like to record the sound for each sentence separately. PowerPoint will place a speaker icon on the slide for each sound added. Your reader will click on these speakers to hear your story.

If you want to make a speaking communication board, or you want your reader to be able to click on individual words to hear them, you can make the speaker icons invisible. This way a speaker can be on top of a word and you can still see the word.

See Michael Reed Tutorials Playlist on YouTube for movies showing how to make the navigation buttons; how to add sound to PowerPoint; how to make the sound files from text; how to convert AIFF to MP3 in iTunes; and how to make a PowerPoint story into a movie – the example is in iMovie, but all movie editing programs let you add pictures to the video track and sound files to the audio track.

Navigating:

http://www.youtube.com/michaelbrianreed#play/user/1DEC67BCCC17ED99/2/wUAsi4MogzQ

Tutorial movie showing how to use Action Buttons as page-turners for your readers to click on to move through your slideshow / PowerPoint story.

Adding sounds to PowerPoint:

http://www.youtube.com/michaelbrianreed#play/user/1DEC67BCCC17ED99/3/7ebk7vF71sk

Tutorial movie showing two ways to add sound to PowerPoint - Record Sound, or Insert a Sound File from your computer. There is another way to add sound to PowerPoint - Record Narration - but this one means being ready to narrate the whole slideshow at once, and it is tricky to go back in and edit out gaps and mistakes.

Sound files made Text-to-Speech software:

http://www.youtube.com/michaelbrianreed#play/user/1DEC67BCCC17ED99/4/Z4LY2Mm4nbY

Tutorial movie showing how to make MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files for individual words, sentences or whole documents, by typing or pasting text into free text-to-speech programs available for Windows and Mac. For people with speech impairments like me this is a good way to get a voice for presentations and for narrating movies and PowerPoint stories. It would be great for anyone who would rather listen to than read text.

Convert AIFF to MP3 in iTunes:

http://www.youtube.com/michaelbrianreed#play/user/1DEC67BCCC17ED99/1/V5bPc0d4-cg

Movie tutorial for how to change the format of a file (song) in iTunes, One of the text-to-speech programs we use saves text as an AIFF, which is uncompressed and lossless, and is about 4 to 6 times bigger file size than MP3, so we convert to MP3 before adding the sound files to powerPoint or a movie.

PowerPoint movie:

http://www.youtube.com/michaelbrianreed#play/user/1DEC67BCCC17ED99/0/XFfiaQfF5cY

Movie tutorial showing how to make a movie of a PowerPoint presentation or story by putting photos of the slides on the movie track in a movie editing program, and audio files to narrate the movie on the audio track.

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